About 1 in 10 adult citizens, or 21.3 million eligible voters, say they either do not have or could not quickly find in order to show the next day their U.S. birth certificate, passport, naturalization certificate or certificate of citizenship, according to results released Tuesday from a national survey.
It's not about voter integrity.
As the Brennan Center for Justice explained, the insidious intent is to further hamper opportunities to vote.
The bill would functionally eliminate mail registration by requiring voters registering by mail to produce citizenship documents "in person" to an election official before the registration deadline. It would also abolish many or all voter registration drives and online voter registration systems, which are typically treated like mail registration. (Moreover, the bill does not contemplate copies or electronic records of citizenship documents.) And it would severely hamper automatic voter registration, as many of those transactions don't occur in person while someone has citizenship documents with them.
Like many republican-led efforts to squash democracy, the SAVE Act would, ironically, negatively impact more republican voters than Democratic ones since republicans are less likely to have passports, and republican-leaning women are doubly likely to have changed their surname s.
As the Center for American Progress delineates:
High rates of passport ownership are overwhelmingly concentrated in blue states, while low rates are concentrated in red states.
In seven states, less than one-third of citizens have a valid passport: West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.
Only in four states do more than two-thirds of citizens have a valid passport: New York, Massachusetts, California, and New Jersey.
It is already illegal for non-citizens to register to vote, contrary to hysteria on the right about "Democrats encouraging migrants into the country to vote for Democrats".
Everyone who registers to vote is required to sign an affidavit attesting to citizenship. Those who violate that statute face severe fines, imprisonment, or deportation. Non-citizens who attempt to register to vote can also lose the opportunity to obtain U.S. citizenship.
Director of voting and elections for Common Cause, Sylvia Albert, argued:
Anybody who is on a green card or attempting to get citizenship in America, they are not trying to be arrested or to be tossed out of the country.
Reporting for NPR, Jude Joffe-Blockwrote:
Election officials regularly verify voter registration information and remove ineligible voters from voter rolls. Some states verify citizenship by cross-checking voter information with other databases, such as state motor vehicle data or the federal SAVE database. Election officials must be careful not to mistakenly remove eligible voters from voter rolls, since some databases may be outdated and may not show if an immigrant has become a naturalized citizen. Such errors resulted in large numbers of eligible citizens wrongly flagged for removal in Texas in 2019 and has repeated this year as Republican officials in a number of states have publicized new initiatives to remove possible non-citizens that have ensnared eligible U.S. citizens.
Proponents of the SAVE Act--and those generally ignorant of the registration safeguards in place--naturally trot out anecdotal "evidence" of "illegal" voting.
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